


When the Stars Fall

by ADashOfStarshine (ADashOfInsanity)



Category: Hatoful Kareshi | Hatoful Boyfriend
Genre: Absolute Zero-verse, Gen, Potential for more warnings later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-04 22:32:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4155477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ADashOfInsanity/pseuds/ADashOfStarshine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Martyrs and Monsters alike have stories. Yet some of these stories, deserving of legends, are forgotten to the sands of time. Here lies the tale of two brothers: a merchant’s child and an heir to the stars. Born of a conquered civilisation, Halt and Estelle have much to survive even before they must face their destinies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Stars Fall

 His Great Aunt had said that the missionaries started it all off. Men of the cloth came in droves, sweating and squalling in the heat. The church’s many mouths were mostly ignored by the populace. If not disregarded completely, they were pacified like squalling babies with the neck of a bottle until they were satisfied and departed. No one thought much of conversion. Those over-sized babies in their white gowns spoke of invisible and untouchable forces, of expanses no one could fully know or understand. To those who believed in the shifting stars, this was crazy talk. You only needed to step outdoors to know the heavens were watching over you. Why believe in something you could never know was real. These overgrown children preached tales for those as gullible as their own kind. There was nothing in them worth spending a copper over.

The missionaries went away after a few years. Or so Halt had been told. He had been born in the peaceful times and had grown up between the woven baskets and rolls of cloth that seemed ever-present in the town’s market. His parents occupied a large room above a cloth trader’s store. Their daily work was unloading and selling the fine wares at the market. Halt spent his formative years dodging between cart and carpet, playing cat and mouse with the sweet seller. Big J would let him keep whatever he managed to swipe due a debt he owed to Halt’s parents. When not running wild in the bazaar, Halt sat in a cool room beneath the cloth trader’s store where he and the seller’s children would receive help with their letters and numbers. Despite his lower status, and second hand materials, Halt was always a faster learner than the traders’ sons. Numbers came to him as easily as sleeping or eating. Letters weren’t too far behind. His teacher said he had Promising Things ahead of him. Halt had never known what Promising Things were, but it sounded like the stars had blessed his future, and for that, he was happy.

Then the slavers came. Great Aunt Dani, who was everyone’s Great Aunt not just his, said it was because of the missionaries. They had gone back to their far off piece of world and used words like ‘exotic’ and ‘beautiful. Now people wanted to sell bits of their life off to the missionaries’ world so they could go ‘oo’ and ‘ah’ and poke at them. Dani was full of fantastic stories so Halt hadn’t believed her at first. Yet realisation came as brutal as the knife to a fish’s neck.  Halt, aged ten, had been off chasing Big J when the men first came. Big J had pushed him into a basket large enough to fit three of him and put the lid on top just as the shouting began.

Halt never found out what happened to Big J. When the shouting had stopped, he poked his head from the basket. The market was a mess but the merchants were trying to sell on and the customers steadily returned. But Big J wasn’t there. Neither was Lila who sold at the fruit stand. Neither were the twins who made new chairs out of bits of broken furniture.

Halt’s parents never let him stray too far from the cloth stall from then on. They created a little hole in the stacks of fabric that Halt could crawl into if needs be. Every time the shouting came, they would push Halt inside and wouldn’t let him out until it had all stopped. Great Aunt Dani, who came over for tea, said people were being taken far far away and they were never going to come back. Halt couldn’t help but believe her as the market got emptier

Then came The Night the Stars Fell. Great Aunt Dani had come huffing and puffing to their door, telling them to get to the roof for the stars were being thrown from the sky. Halt and his parents clambered to the top of their home and there met the cloth trader and his two sons and three daughters. They watched half-fearful, half-awed, as streaks of light lit the heavens. Halt thought it was as if someone had strewn metal filings across the inky cloth of the night sky. He watched, tears in his eyes, as the stars abandoned their places and dropped away like beads off a woman’s throat, rolling away into nothingness. Where were they going? Why were they abandoning them now?

How long they had spent staring at the weeping sky, Halt would never be able to recall. However it seemed no time at all passed before that fateful cry of:

“Mercy! I beg you! Mercy!”

It was Grand Aunt Dani. She had still been sitting outside their door upon the stairs for she could not climb all the way up onto the roof. She was stood before a dozen men, all of which dressed head to toe in black. If the stars had not been falling they never would have been seen coming.

“Halt, run!” cried his mother, “We’ll follow! Go!” His mother’s terror was a shockingly shrill sound in the silence of the night, Halt obeyed without thought. He nimbly scaled the other side of the building. The trader’s children followed his example, even if they were not quite as agile.  The black-covered men seemed to lose patience with Great Aunt Dani for they began their usual shouting. Halt touched the ground and crouched there for a mere moment. It was a moment too long. He heard a high pitched scream and the thump of someone falling from the stairs.

Tears, at first shed for the falling stars, began to flow thick and fast in his fright. He spared one more moment to glance at the trader’s children, before sprinting off into the night. He thought he heard his father yell as he ducked and weaved through the empty market.

Great Aunt Dani wasn’t around to tell him how many had gone missing that night. That band of black covered men hadn’t been the only group. That was certain. Halt had run directionless through streets and passages, stopping only to draw breath in alleys darker than the night itself. His heart fluttered in his chest, beating harder and faster that it had done even in his chases after Big J. Tears, this time unbidden and unhelpful, streamed down his cheeks as he heard screams and cries from the surrounding buildings. He was sure he saw the seller’s children once more, however they were being dragged away by the black-clad men, who pressed knives to their trembling backs.

When he could run no more he collapsed in an empty home. It was a simple room next to a wide courtyard where grapes and figs left to dry out in the sun. The smell of rotten fruit filled the air, thick and nauseating, however it was an easy price to pay for safety. Halt clambered inside through a badly patched hole on the roof. The hole remained as he lay collapsed upon the ground, panting hard as the stars continued to fall overhead, unaltered.  The stars must have foreseen this tragedy and that was why the sky wept. Did the sky, like him, wish to cry out for his parents? For Great Aunt Dani? For the trader’s children?  A sob came unrepressed. Great Aunt Dani had said whoever was taken never came back. That meant…That meant… Curling into a ball, Halt buried his face in his hands. His mother had said run. His mother had said she’d follow but… Had he run too far? Maybe he had been too fast. Had he lost her? If he hadn’t run so far, would that have stopped her being… No. It couldn’t be his fault. It couldn’t. It couldn't!

However long ago that night was, Halt would swear it lasted an age. Fits of weeping were interspersed with moments of unconsciousness when his exhausted body gave into the need to sleep.  Each nap could have taken no longer than an hour. He would jolt awake every time he heard footsteps or the wind whistling through the hole in the roof.  As soon as he became aware of his position again, it overwhelmed him. So he sobbed himself back to sleep again.

It took six or seven of these cycles for Halt to realise he wasn’t alone in this room.  As he lay, curled up amidst the horrid fruit smell, he felt someone touch his shoulder. He jolted back, scrambling into a low crouching position. However his terror soon turned into amazement. Standing before him, one hand still outstretched, was a small boy. He looked no older than four or five. His hands, now both clenched in his sleeves, were trembling as he stared at Halt through large eyes the colour of firelight.  Halt blinked at him, unsure for a moment if the boy was there or whether this was some bizarre dream. Yet no, the pale child, illuminated only by the  falling stars, was quite real. He was staring at Halt as if mesmerised by him . Halt checked behind him. No. That was a wall.

“A-Are you alright?” he asked the boy. The little one was dressed strangely. His clothes were surprisingly fine for a child who was at the age to go playing in sand and storerooms. Well, that was what Halt had done at his age but this boy was clearly something different. He had a necklace clasped about his throat. It only had four beads upon it but Halt could recognise them anywhere. Those were the sorts of beads priests wore about their necks. Those who lived under the teachings of the stars wore jewellery bearing emblems of the stars they were born under. When anyone else was born, their parents were told what their stars were. (He was born under the eye of the snake, it meant he was going to grow up quick-witted and cunning.) However priests and priestesses wore their stars about their person. Halt inched a little closer to the child. He didn’t shy away.

Halt could now see there were pictures upon the colourful beads about the boy’s neck. He could just about make out three shapes and… a bead without a picture on it? Halt flinched  in surprise as the child tried to touch him again. However the brush of those little fingers seemed to paralyse him in place. The boy began to gently brush away the last of the tears upon Halt’s face. A strange shiver overtook him, as if those star-pale hands had some kind of power to them. A power that had now seeped into his person without warning and made him feel like he had jumped into a pool of water.

“Are you with someone?” he whispered to the boy,  a little breathless in light of such a strange sensation. The boy merely shook his head and looked at the floor, perhaps having deemed the last of Halt’s tears wiped away. It looked as if he was about to weep and Halt immediately realised his error. The only reason why a child this small would be left alone, was if there was no one there to look after them. Perhaps he too had run away when the men came. Yet he was so small, he couldn’t have run here all the way from the temple by himself. Halt was fairly sure this boy was from the temple, why else would he be dressed up like a priest?

“Want me to take you back home?” Halt offered.

Shaking his head, the boy raised his over-sized sleeves to his face. Upon seeing his shoulders tremble, Halt realised that he was trying to hide his tears. In horror, Halt started. He drew closer to the boy, who allowed himself to be on the receiving end of a hesitant yet reassuring embrace. So they were in the same situation then? Even those in the temple had not been free from the night time attack? Halt allowed the child to grip onto his shirt and knelt there awkwardly. Perhaps it was someone else’s turn to cry? He clearly wasn’t the only one who had been attacked by strange men, made to run away from home and then left separated from his parents into an unfamiliar and threatening night…

In years to come, Halt would claim that the stars had driven him towards his new purpose. Or it was fate, destiny, or any of the other incredible forces that no individual can truly control. However at that moment, the seller’s son and the stars’ child cried in each other’s arms and bonded through their mutual sorrow. Their union was not harkened by some grand ceremony, but by combined exhaustion. Falling asleep in each other’s’ arms, they finally found some semblance of peace as the stars continued to tumble overhead. In fact neither woke until the sun had reached the highest point in the sky, and all the stars had fled from the scorching heat of the day.

**Author's Note:**

> If you would like to see the theorising over official sources that formed this story, please visit my tumblr at:  
> http://adashofstarshine.tumblr.com/tagged/fic%3A-When-the-Stars-Fall


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